Terror

They came to the edge of the sentence and looked with terror into the great vastness beyond. There was nothing there! "Fill it, fill it quick!"

Teacher

There was a man who spent his life, or much of it, trying to get people- whoever would listen- to understand something of apparently great importance, but noone could ever seem to quite understand what he was trying to tell them.
He would as likely end up gesturing wildly and exclaim in a fury of exasperation: "But it's all so simple!"
"What is?"
"Ahh, you have to see it for yourself! I can't tell you."
"And why not?" they would laugh; though, as an acute observer might have observed, with perhaps a little less self-confidence than the tone might suggest.
"Because if I told you, then you'd think you'd understood, and that would be worse again. At least now you've no such illusions."
The naivety. If he could have divined the depth of their illusions...though perhaps he really was better off not glancing into that snake-pit.

Description

I had a very short-lived career as a television sports journalist, which working duration solely consisted of one interview of a young athlete who had just won a very prestigious race. The interview went as follows:

"Congratulations. How do you feel now?"
"Oh words can't describe how I feel."
"No no, you're misunderstanding the nature of language. Here that's what words do-describe. You may rightly feel even the finest description to be inadequate to the joy you are now feeling, and your own powers of description may be utterly feeble, but your words would still describe how you feel. Don't worry -they wouldn't be the thing itself. And that the description would in all probability be dull to the point of inanity isn't the point. It would still be a description. Do you understand?"
"Yes, I think so."
"So how do you feel?"
"I feel wonderful."

Pure Madness

We want, for some strange reason, to find a centre of absolute unreality, an epicentre of madness, so where do we go? "A lunatic asylum of course!" I see what you mean, but no. The asylum is an epicentre of madness, true enough, but a collection of disparate islands of madness, each self-contained. It is more a geographical centre- where mad people inhabit the same physical edifice but not actually inhabiting the same structure of madness itself.
No, if we want to find people sharing the same actual edifice of delusion, then a stock exchange would seem to be our most obvious destination, or at least the first that comes to my mind: the collectivised, frenzied focusing on an edifice of pure unreal forms, a kingdom of substanceless symbols, and even the symbols in constant flux. Flux in relation to what? Other symbols. And if people stopped believing in the reality of the edifice- the mental, not the physical; what would happen? It would instantly dissolve. Though it could be said that like any edifice of madness it doesn't really exist in the first place, so how can 'it', which is not, dissolve?

The Not Empty Hole

Over much time he dug a large hole in the ground and filled it with water, and now that it was filled with water he called it a pond. What else would he call it? But the water all drained away, or evaporated, or something anyway, and once more it was just a hole in the ground. He saw what had to be done. There was a decent sized stream nearby forever rushing towards its great salty destination, and he began with pick and shovel to cut a channel at the correct gradient between stream and hole, which once more became not just a hole but a pond, and a pond it remained. It transpired in time he was even able to put any overflow to good use.

Vanished Children

Believe that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying.
William Blake

It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!
Luke 17:1

In October 1999, in a ward of dying children, Denis Halliday, the recently resigned Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations said:

The very provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights are being set aside. We are waging a war, through the United Nations, on the children and people of Iraq, and with incredible results. We're targeting civilians...worse, we're targeting children. What is this all about? It's monstrous. The policy of economic sanctions is a sham, is destroying an entire society. Five thousand children die every month. I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide.

Halliday's successor in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, another Assistant Secretary-General with more than thirty years service, also resigned in protest, as did Jutta Burghardt, the head of the World Food Programme.
Between 1991 and 1998, reported the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the infrastructure of the country intentionally crippled by bombing, 500,000 children under the age of five died as a result of chronic malnutrition, polluted water and lack of medical care. In 1999, seventy members of the US Congress appealed to President Clinton to lift the embargo and end what they called "infanticide masquerading as policy." They were missing the point. In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, had been asked: "We have heard that half a million children have died....is the price worth it?" Albright's reply was "...We think the price is worth it."

As of 2002, more than $5 billion worth of humanitarian supplies, approved by the UN Sanctions Committee and pad for by Iraq, were blocked by the Bush administration, backed by the Blair government. They included items related to food, health, water and sanitation. Saddam Hussein was actually strengthened internally by the embargoes, ensuring direct state control over people's lives through their dependence on the state for survival. In the 1990s, on average, Iraq was hit by the US and Britain with bombs or missiles every three days since the 'ceasefire' that purportedly ended the first Gulf War in 1991. As UN documents show, targets included farming communities, fishing villages and other civilian targets.

The above mostly extracted from John Pilger's introduction to a more in-depth look by other reporters at the policies of 'infanticide' in Iraq even before the current adventure(which of course will have added enormously to our numbers),directly leading to deaths of 500,000 children under the ages of five. If we take the Jewish Holocaust and its figure of something like 6 millions as some kind of template for genocide, then, if we were to abstract this half a million of very young children, the percentages compare very 'favourably'. I suppose, if we were feeling a little poetic, we could imagine a city of some half a million inhabitants- a very respectable metropolis- and all these inhabitants under five years of age- a curious place I admit- and then start cutting off their water supply, starving them, occasionally- though not so 'occasionally'- administering a dose of bombing, prevent some misguided sympathisers from getting aid through...

Who are the kind of people behind these actions, and why are Britain and the US always intimately entangled with each other? One earlier look at how the US appears to be the transmuted on-flow of the British Empire, and the essence of their 'conservatism' here.

Sinking

You are sinking, so gently, and while, yes, the liquid into which you are sinking seemed at first like it might be a little...well...putrid; but after a while, as you get used to it, it is really quite sweet and that texture not off-putting at all, but a little syrupy and in the most pleasant way. And no sense of loneliness, only the briefest instants, and as one looks around one's eyes meet those of one the many other bodies, whose gaze all affirm the same truth: how good this is, and we're all here together, so happy.
But in the moments when our eyes don't meet- what do we look like then? Stupid thought. To let go and be relieved of such thoughts...down, down, down.
A flash of sunlight and you see an arm stretched out just above the water, a hand to be grasped, something awakens and you are surging towards it, stretching your arm...but almost as quickly you are surrounded by bodies, their eyes alarmed, censoring, pleading, angry, pitying... And once more you are sinking, and it's so lovely.

Rolling Stone

There was the head of a small construction firm named Sisyphus - the man, not the firm, and he was asked to put in a quote for a job which involved the pushing of a large boulder up a hill, but- and here was the catch - the boulder would, and noone could satisfactorily explain why, invariably fall back down the hill it had just come up, from where it would have to be pushed back up the hill again, from where again it would... only to... and so on. Sisyphus was in two minds. "We could do with the work, no doubt, but hell, we'll have to charge an awful lot. It's gonna take forever."

The Mirror World

He was gazing with a strange, enrapt expression at his reflection in a large mirror; one would have said not out of vanity but something else... something occult even. And then, as if in a trance, he stepped towards the mirror, as if he meant to actually enter the world behind the glass! And then- well, what do you expect- he banged against the glass and was left, looking now very sober and foolish, wondering what the hell was going on his mind.

Not a Writer

I can't do descriptions, and so, sadly, can't be a writer. A real writer I mean, or someone who can really write. For instance, I look outside. "The roof was wet with rain." That's all right, but anyone could write that. That's not really writing. "The roof was wet with rain like ..." like what? I have no idea. It must have been wet like something else, some lovely little selection of words poetically grouped together, but I have no idea what they are. That's not the way I think. When I see a wet roof, a ditch, a muddy river estuary, I never find myself thinking they look like something else, or feeling the faintest desire to trasmute the sight into the strange medium of words, never mind being able to effect the actual describing itself. No such literary stirrings stir me. I just look. I suppose you could say the one thing I don't see when I look at a field or some other slice of the external world is words. They don't enter my field of vision. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

In Sickness Not in Health- More Of

This piece continued. If you're gonna read this, read that first.

"And so we can expect him to be launched on a life of ferocious depravity?"
"Well, perhaps not in the sense you imagine. Have a look at this." And we are looking at a well-to-do man in a well-to-do house gazing serenely from his most elegant and most comfortable armchair at a large wide-screen television set, on which is showing some American programme from some very widely loved television series. It is of course the most mediocre of fare, but given the ordinary(apologies to 'ordinary') standard against which it is judged, well then, this is the most marvellous art. And thank God for the people who make such stuff! What would our poor lives be otherwise?

"But he looks happy and harmless enough. I thought you said he was debased."
"This man grew up reading, or at least sometimes, people like Nietzsche, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Joyce and the like- he's even written books on great sociological, philosophical themes. Of course, he caught that inner illness of telling himself life was sick, but to actually dwell in the ugliness of that landscape is far from pleasant. But it is the mind that led him there. He won't mind having the thought of general sickness in the background; it serves a purpose after all- eliminates the burden and horizon of obligations."
"Obligations to whom?"
"Himself and everyone else, of course. So, it is the mind that led him into that landscape, and there's no need for any attempt to change that land- that sick land is all there is, so what's to change- but, well, life should still be comfortable; what's the point of it all if one doesn't allow oneself these pleasant consolations, and, well, can one really expect to enjoy these comforts if one's mind is telling oneself life is sick and depraved? You've made your nest nice and cosy but your mind is spoiling things a little. So it needs to be cast away, though of course without the awareness of its being cast away; the intellect above everything, after all. And so, here's the answer: the television. That will soothe the savage beast. All those other millions upon millions basking in the communal glow of whatever show from America is busy substituting that almost forgotten world, that of Shakespeare, Mozart, Kafka, Tarkovsky... "But this is art too, I tell you....great art..." And so we leave our contented man, gazing serernely, smothering the nasty, but necessary, thought.

Existential Historical

"Oh God, here we go again. More solipsistic nonsense."
Solipsistic? Nonsense. I accept the existence of the reader as an existential fact."
"Thank God for that."
"It's the writer I deny."
"The writer? But that's you. How can you deny your own existence?"
"Let me explain. Within a slice of historical time, a written piece, for example this one, is indeed written. In fact, this is being written right now, but that 'right now' no longer exists in the sense implied, but it does exist precisely 'right now' and only 'right now' when being read. So the reader here exists as existential fact, but the writer merely as historical fact, and is there anything more dubious than an historical fact?"
"Okay, but you should know there's been complaints."
"Complaints?"
"Yes, complaints. 'A lack of plausible characters.'"
Pause. "Well what do you think?"
"About what?"
"What do you think?! The bloody complaint. Do you find your existence plausible?"
"Well yes, of course. But what else do you expect me to say? I don't know anything else."
"Well if you don't know anything else, then what are you complaining about?"
"I'm not the one complaining."
"Well tell whoever is the same thing I just told you, and see what he says."

In Sickness Not in Health

Western intellectual man, if such a man still exists- perhaps he surfaces during ad breaks- is, or at least was, a great hypochondriac: he keeps telling himself he is sick.
"Ah, but to exist is to be sick."
"But he only feels himself to be sick because he keeps telling himself he is sick."
"No, he tells himself he is sick because he really is sick."

There, what did I tell you. Because the thoughts in his thought-filled being are sick, then voila, the proof of his wisdom all wrapped up in itself.
He kept telling himself he was sick and that he required something to be made better- the right words in the right order perhaps. After enough time of telling himself he is sick, and the inevitable non-appearance of contradicting health, he becomes convinced that this sickness is all there is; there is no getting better as there is no 'better'.

Rather than his unhappiness being the thread that is calling him out of his misery- the intimation that he is going wrong, immersed in false form- he makes himself at home in this sick world, and, justifying the lack of effort to get out of this ugliness, even makes a philosophy of truth out of this baseness: "All is sick. The honest men realise this. It is the ones who say that sickness is not truth who are dishonest." Now he is free to really roll around in the muck, fill his nostrils with the stuff.

Correct Order

The writing that follows was actually written before this here which merely serves as an introduction to that which was already written. Why that should be of interest to anyone is not my business to know- the reader's inner life is his own- but that it may be of interest is, like all possible things, certainly possible.
"Yes but the mere fact of something being possible shouldn't be enough to make it a literary fact. The writer must choose the essential." A literary fact, you say? Does the mere fact of it being written make it a fact? Well, I suppose if being written isn't enough to make something a literary fact, then what is? But perhaps we better clarify things. Are individual words literary facts? At the atomic level, yes, the individual word lives. Look up a dictionary if you don't believe me. But what good is a word in isolation? "Celebrated", for example. On its own it's almost embarrassing. It requires a wider context, the fellowship of accompaniment.

Anyway, as said, what follows the beginning was already written before the first bit. "But how do we know?" says you, kindly assuming the existence of more than one of you. It's a good point, and unfortunately I am unable to respond in any kind of satisfactory manner. You don't and can't know what was written first, though why you should be bothered in the first place is itself interesting...well, not quite interesting. Perhaps you are interested because you are a little pedantic. A lot of people do very well in life precisely by virtue of their pedantry. Or at least they might. I hadn't really thought about it before now. To be honest I'm not even really thinking about it now. But to put your mind at ease, not that that's really in my power, if you want to know in what order this was written, well then you'll have to take my word for it. It poured itself out in precisely the order I alluded to earlier: what came later, which of course includes this, was actually written first, and that's not all. It's actually much more experimental again. The entire piece was originally written backwards, but subsequently inverted out of consideration and respect for the reader.

From Ignorance to Knowledge

Regarding the notion of self-knowledge or the movement from inner spiritual or philosophical ignorance to knowledge: Movement from a starting point of A to a destination point of B presupposes the existence of both A and B. But insofar as the independent existence of points apart from the whole within which they have their existence is obviously illusory, so the mind's movement from ignorance to knowledge is illusory, merely a conceptual notion of the mind in the first place. One could also point out, how can ignorance of reality be a real point within reality, which is a necessary feature of this ignorance to knowledge movement.

The Intellectual Koan

A monk asked, "All things are said to be reducible to the One, but where is the One to be reduced?" Chao-chou answered, "When I was in the district of Ch'ing I had a robe that weighed seven chin."

D.T. Suzuki offers the above as an example of the koan exercise in his essay The Reason of Unreason: the Koan Exercise, and says:

The worst enemy of Zen experience, at least in the beginning, is the intellect, which consists and insists in discriminating subject from object. The discriminating intellect, therefore, must be cut short if Zen consciousness is to unfold itself, and the koan is constructed entirely to serve this end...A psychological impasse is the necessary antecedent of satori, and we at once notice that there is no room in the koan to insert an intellectual interpretation. The wall against which the Yogin has been beating( in trying with his intellect to 'solve' the koan) hitherto to no purpose breaks down, and an entirely new vista of consciousness opens before him.

Well if the discipline does yield the desired results, then there is no questioning its usefulness, but I suspect the koan is perhaps too removed from Western consciousness to be an especially fruitful discipline here- taking my own self as a symptom rather than a case in isolation. Rather than feel compelled to attack with my mind the koan, thus hopefully yielding the results, it simply doesn't especially interest me, and not having supplied the necessary mental tension there arise no results.
What is essentially being aspired to here is the movement from the finite to the infinite, from the centre of the intellect bound self to the living state of consciousness which actually produces the manifestations of intellect, from the abstraction of a word sustained sense of being to the organic centre of actual life. However, thought is a manifestation of the mind and perhaps through the very route of thought itself a different but related path can be cut leading to the same desired inner destination. And this is the point in what probably appears a strange, pointless post recently like Another Trapdoor, where was written:

This shouldn't be written.

Well, what is so interesting about that? Like the koan a rational explanation is the enemy for there the intellect finds a place of rest, a meaning, and it moves on very much as it already was, and so 'explanation' is very double-edged, but here perhaps necessary, given how unusual this form of thought actually is. What I presume is most likely happens with this line is that the reader sees "This shouldn't be written", and moves immediately along the normal logical path the mind works on, and for a brief moment wonders why it shouldn't be written, doesn't know, finds it a bit strange, pointless and inelegant, an odd essay in humour perhaps; and moves on to read something else. But am I trying to claim there is something extraordinary about such a simple line?

The line is not preceded by something like, "All humans are scum and deserve to die", then followed by- "This shouldn't be written." No, all we have is "This shouldn't be written."
'So you're saying "This shouldn't be written" shouldn't be written? Why not?'
No, that's not what is written. Such a reader isn't looking at the line with enough directness, but jumping aboard the normal logical routes to the imagined intellectual destination. But here we just have "This shouldn't be written", not "This shouldn't be written shouldn't be written." But here is the point and the problem in explication for me- I cannot do the work for the reader. It's a thought that has no linguistic flaws, is perfectly ordinary, and yet the mind cannot find rest in it. It defies the normal logical path, but is not an illogical line.
"Do you mean 'This' shouldn't be written, as in the word 'this'? No, you're not looking directly enough. All we have is the line "This shouldn't be written."
"Well what does the "'This' in the line refer to?" "Ah, now we're getting somewhere. 'This' refers to the line 'This shouldn't be written"...
And because the train of thought is itself the enemy to the direct existential perception, the isolated line again:

This shouldn't be written.

An earlier similar thought produced repeated below, later examined with reluctance here:

This is a translation.

A Glimpse Into the Engine-Room of Literature

"Ah, this conversation is going nowhere!"
"You only just started it."
"No, no, that's just the first line. I'm trying to give the impression we're in the middle of some heated discussion."
"And what am I supposed to do?"
"Keep going- make something up."
"Okay, give me a second...But Bismarck was a fool, I tell you."
"What?"
"You know... Bismarck- Prussian Chancellor, unification of Germany..."
"I know who Bismarck was. What the hell put him into your head?"
"I don't know. Just the first thing that came to mind."
"And what kind of conversation do do you think we can end up having about him?"
"I don't know. Maybe we could try blaming him for World War One, and move on from there."
"Ah this is so stupid. Who's going to want to read this kind of rubbish?"
"You never know. There might be an audience out there crying out for exactly this kind of thing."
"No there isn't."
"All right, all right, I'll think of something else."
"Forget it. We'll end up looking even bigger fools."

In Essence

"What is thought of as philosophy can generally be described as a kind of debased, third-rate hashish experience."
"What do you mean?"
""Isn't it obvious? You get all the endless, self-generating paranoiacal nonsense, but without the getting high."

Another Trapdoor

This shouldn't be written.

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution

Below from the titled book, all online here, by Anthony Sutton. Sutton was an economics professor at California State University Los Angeles and a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973. During his time at the Hoover Institute he wrote the major study Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (in three volumes), detailing how the West played a major role in developing Soviet Union from its very beginnings up until the present time (1970). He was forced out of the Hoover Institute after publishing National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union in 1973.


Dear Mr. President:

I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the Russian people...

Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from William Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp.; director, American International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Author's preface
Since the early 1920s, numerous pamphlets and articles, even a few books, have sought to forge a link between "international bankers" and "Bolshevik revolutionaries." Rarely have these attempts been supported by hard evidence, and never have such attempts been argued within the framework of a scientific methodology. Indeed, some of the"evidence" used in these efforts has been fraudulent, some has been irrelevant, much cannot be checked. Examination of the topic by academic writers has been studiously avoided; probably because the hypothesis offends the neat dichotomy of capitalists versus Communists (and everyone knows, of course, that these are bitter enemies). Moreover, because a great deal that has been written borders on the absurd, a sound academic reputation could easily be wrecked on the shoals of ridicule. Reason enough to avoid the topic.

Fortunately, the State Department Decimal File, particularly the 861.00 section, contains extensive documentation on the hypothesized link. When the evidence in these official papers is merged with non-official evidence from biographies, personal papers, and conventional histories, a truly fascinating story emerges.

We find there was a link between some New York international bankers and many revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks. These banking gentlemen -- who are here identified -- had a financial stake in, and were rooting for, the success of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Who, why -- and for how much -- is the story in this book.

Antony C. Sutton
March 1974

The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in 1911 for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and writer who doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled by prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded, beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked under his arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P. Morgan, Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt -- prominently identified by his famous teeth -- in the background. Wall Street is decorated by Red flags.

Was Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was on firm ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street and Marxist socialism. The characters in Minor's cartoon -- Karl Marx (symbolizing the future revolutionaries Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller -- and indeed Robert Minor himself, are also prominent characters in this book.

The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under the rug of history because they do not fit the accepted conceptual spectrum of political left and political right. Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or unfortunate errors.

On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist. The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and the international socialist (for example, the communist) both recommend totalitarian politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of society.

While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the monopolists -- under the name of the public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.

Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists -- to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians -- with a few notable exceptions -- have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. Suppose -- and it is only hypothesis at this point -- that American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?

In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but a story that departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach of capitalists versus communists. Our story postulates a partnership between international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this alliance has fallen upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the individual American. Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the world has been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of these monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.

This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The tsars and their corrupt political system were ejected only to be replaced by the new powerbrokers of another corrupt political system. Where the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to bring about a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized tsarist Russia or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia. And the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the underlying and, so far, untold history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.

And the link again here to continue reading.

The Free

Out walking, I came to a field in which were a large number of people tied by various lengths of rope to posts stuck in the ground, around which they were walking. Though the circumference of the individual's world was determined by the length of his rope, each seemed oblivious to its very existence.
It was hard to hear but I did catch a snatch or two of conversation. "I am free." "Yes, we are all free."
And also, thanks to a little stealth, this exchange between two haughty looking men who were attached to cords of slightly longer length than the norm. "They think they are free but are not." The other smiled. "True, but we are."
The other chuckled. "Of course. And our awareness of their not being free makes us all the more so." I walked on.

Bed Wridden

"What's that fella doing in the bed with all that paper?"
"Him? Oh, he's been at that for years. He's capturing the past."
"But isn't the past past? Gone?"
"Oh no, he has it all written down."

Forgery

I did not write this.